Yakuza Kiwami 3: RGG Claims This Remake Is Hiding The Series' Future

RGG Studio is incapable of doing anything the easy way, and honestly, I love them for it.

Most developers release a remake to make a quick buck and tap into our collective nostalgia for the PS3 era. You polish the textures, fix the frame rate, and call it a day. But RGG Studio Director Masayoshi Yokoyama woke up and chose violence (or at least, cryptic marketing).

According to a new interview, Yakuza Kiwami 3 is going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting for the future of the Like a Dragon series.

The Yokoyama Prophecy

Speaking to GameWatch (and translated by the folks at Automaton), Yokoyama dropped a quote that has the entire fanbase putting on their tinfoil hats. He flat-out said that if you look at Kiwami 3 as a standard remake, "you'd be hugely mistaken."

He claims the game contains "major hints" about the future direction of the franchise.

"We haven’t officially announced anything related to that yet," Yokoyama teased. "But once you play it, I think you’ll get an idea, or rather, a pretty solid sense of what we intend to do with the series going forward."

This is classic Yokoyama. The man knows exactly how to dangle a carrot in front of us. He is effectively telling us that skipping this entry because "I already played Yakuza 3 in 2009" is a bad move. He is implying that the narrative DNA of the next mainline game is being rewritten into the code of this remake.

The "Dark Ties" Connection

The most obvious place these hints are hiding is in the new "Dark Ties" expansion.

We already know this isn't a 1:1 recreation of the original game. They are adding a substantial new chunk of story where we get to play as Yoshitaka Mine. For the uninitiated, Mine is one of the best antagonists in the series (and the chairman of the Hakuho Clan), but his screen time was criminally short in the original.

If RGG is planting seeds for the future, they are likely buried in Mine's new chapters.

The Like a Dragon series loves to bring people back from the dead or retcon survival stories. Is it possible that the events of Dark Ties are going to alter the timeline? Or maybe they are introducing a new faction or character in the past that will come back to haunt Ichiban Kasuga in the present day.

Why This Matters

Usually, I roll my eyes at this kind of "wait and see" marketing. It often turns out to be nothing more than a post-credits scene or an Easter egg.

But RGG Studio has earned the benefit of the doubt. They turned a turn-based RPG joke into a global phenomenon with Infinite Wealth. If they say Kiwami 3 is a bridge to the future, I believe them.

We won't have to wait long to find out what kind of narrative tangled web they have woven. Yakuza Kiwami 3 and the Dark Ties expansion launch on February 12th. I am already preparing my conspiracy board.

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